Chapter 18: Letter from a Birmingham Jail
The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. Ed. Clayborne Carson, 2001
In the entire country, there was no place to compare with Birmingham. The largest industrial city in the South, Birmingham had become, in the thirties, a symbol for bloodshed when trade unions sought to organize. It was a community in which human rights had been trampled on for so long that fear and oppression were as thick in its atmosphere as the smog from its factories. Its financial interests were interlocked with a power structure which spread throughout the South and radiated into the North. The challenge to nonviolent, direct action could not have been staged in a more appropriate arena.
MARCH 28, 1963 The Kings' fourth child, Bernice Albertirie, is born APRIL 2 Albert Boutwell wins runoff election over Police Commissioner Eugene "Bull" Connor for mayor of Birmingham, but Connor and other city commissioners refuse to leave office APRIL 3 After delays in order to avoid interfering with-election, SCLC and -Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights launch protest - , campaign in Birmingham APRIL 12 After violating a state circuit court injunction against protests,King' is arrested APRIL 15 President Kennedy calls Coretta Scott King expressing concern for her jailed husband
If you had visited Birmingham before the third of April in the one hundredth-anniversary year of the Negro's emancipation, you might have come to a startling conclusion. You might have concluded that here was a city which had been trapped for decades in a Rip